A new error measure for forecasts of household-level, high resolution electrical energy consumption

Stephen Haben, Jonathan Ward, Danica Vukadinovic Greetham, Colin Singleton and Peter Grindrod

International Journal of Forecasting, 2014, vol. 30, issue 2, 246-256

Abstract: As low carbon technologies become more pervasive, distribution network operators are looking to support the expected changes in the demands on the low voltage networks through the smarter control of storage devices. Accurate forecasts of demand at the individual household-level, or of small aggregations of households, can improve the peak demand reduction brought about through such devices by helping to plan the most appropriate charging and discharging cycles. However, before such methods can be developed, validation measures which can assess the accuracy and usefulness of forecasts of the volatile and noisy household-level demand are required. In this paper we introduce a new forecast verification error measure that reduces the so-called “double penalty” effect, incurred by forecasts whose features are displaced in space or time, compared to traditional point-wise metrics, such as the Mean Absolute Error, and p-norms in general. The measure that we propose is based on finding a restricted permutation of the original forecast that minimises the point-wise error, according to a given metric. We illustrate the advantages of our error measure using half-hourly domestic household electrical energy usage data recorded by smart meters, and discuss the effect of the permutation restriction.

Keywords: Verification methods; Load forecasting; Volatile data; Smart meter; Error measure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169207013001386
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intfor:v:30:y:2014:i:2:p:246-256

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2013.08.002

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Forecasting is currently edited by R. J. Hyndman

More articles in International Journal of Forecasting from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().